HILARY SWANK IS SMILIN’, TOO, JACK!

Yesterday, we received word from The Hollywood Reporter that Samuel L. Jackson had become attached to the once and future Smilin’ Jack Ruby’s Unfinished Country, a South Africa-set hospital drama. Today, it’s Hilary Swank who’s gettin’ in the Wheaton business with an adaptation of John Marks’s Fangland.

Actually, she’s been in the Wheaton business for months, as Mark turned in his first draft of the script pre-strike. As you might’ve already guessed from the title, Fangland is concerned with beasts of the bloodsucking variety, but, in Marks’s hands (and, I’m sure, Mark’s, too) it’s after something smarter and more literary than, say, Underworld. According to the synopsis over at Amazon, the narrative is a contemporary riff on Bram Stoker’s Dracula in which television news producer Evangeline Harker travels to Romania to do a profile on a nefarious arms dealer named Ion Torgu. Given her last name, it should come as no surprise to Evangeline when she discovers that Torgu is, in fact, Dracula.

John Marks is a former producer for 60 Minutes, so he obviously brought a learned perspective to the novel (which I’ve heard is quite good). Swank is attached to play Harker, while the role of Torgu is currently up for grabs (perhaps this would be an ideal re-teaming of Swank and Gerard Butler after P.S. I Love You cleans up this holiday season). Das Films and Blumhouse Productions are set to co-produce.

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